Performers, Aside 5 @ the Red Room, March 29 2014
Saturday, March 29th, 2014 Time: 6:30pm – 10:00pm
Red Room’s fifth exclusive event, where five artists share their most imaginative, courageous and inspiring performances.
Featuring:
Bio:
David Gentile came to Taiwan years ago to study Chinese and Kung Fu, then ended up graduating from the Chinese Dept. at NTNU this past Summer. He traveled throughout the US before coming to Taiwan, and has always enjoyed coming up with little one-two line rhymes about the strange, beautiful, or troubling people, places, and things he encountered along the way.
“The poems started to become a way for me to impermanently document my experiences and even influenced the way I saw the world. Places became references to epic lines with names like “The Dog-Rocket House” or “The Dust Palace” that echoed the feeling of the abandoned hotel in the Lost Boys. People around me started to have nicknames so colorful and fitting that they sounded like the cast of Dick Tracy villains, and even the simplest of tasks were a mix between everyone’s own unique dog commands and rhyming slang. Basically, we got in there like swimwear, and now I have a whole new time zone…”
Bio:
Charlie Storrar is an editor and comedian based in Taipei. He spends his working hours thinking of puns for headlines and his evenings performing stand-up and improv. He is the host of the regular comedy quiz night Charlie Storrar’s Death Panel.
Content:
How I Became a Born-Again Sinner (shared at the recent Story Slam)
Charlie Storrar <charliestorrar@yahoo.co.uk>
Bio:
Josh Drye is a classically trained guitarist, composer, and songwriter that is putting most of his concentration now into the study of song form as it has evolved through the ages. He studied classical guitar and composition at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and then moved to New York City where he worked as a side man for various ensembles in Brooklyn and Manhattan, composer of theater music for productions as diverse as Shakespeare to Pinter, rehearsal accompanist for musicals, and could be found most Thursday nights belting out Irish music at Paddy Reilly’s. He has lived in Taiwan for a little less than a year. He has great taste in sweaters and vintage antiques. He doesn’t like ceramic cats, though, or baseball, so kindly refrain from asking him about either. It’ll just be awkward.
Performance Statement:
I hope to present a few of my favorite songs. I want to pick them apart for you and show you how they work, then put them back together and spin ’em so you can see them in motion and understand what’s happening. Songs are one of the most ancient and instinctual forms of human expression. Each one carries with it a wealth of images, symbols, stories and emotions that all mean something different for each person but can still create a shared collective catharsis. I am going to play a few songs from different time periods, styles, and cultures to show that, no matter how large the gap is of time or space, we all have felt and hopefully always will feel the same big emotions about love, life, friendship, death and everything in between.
Josh Drye <joshbdrye@gmail.com>
Red Room Radio Redux (R 4) has been commissioned to present a reading of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, widely regarded as one of the most important modern poems of the 20th century. For this special reading of the poem, The Waste Land has been adapted for four voices with live sound effects and accompanied by the music by influential contemporaries of the poet: Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berlin, Ravel, and popular music in London at the time. The readers feature Marc Anthony, Andrianna Smela, Charlie Storrar, and Pat Woods, and is directed by Ruth Landowne Giordano. The text is rich with dramatic situations, dialogs, lyrics, foreign languages and the inner workings of the poet’s mind during a time of rapid social changes. This will surely be a unique approach to this historic piece.
From the desk of IR
T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land : A Radio Drama probes the mystery of existence, the angst of the human heart and the marvelous irony that our dread of death celebrates our elation and passion to live.
Red Room Radio Redux <r4.radioredux@gmail.com>
Bio:
Like most artists, in younger days Tina was a Taiwanese hippy, rebelling against anything that interfered with her free will. She loved playing the guitar and learned American music while participating in all the social movements when Taiwan was seeking its identity in the early 80s.
After 30 years, she knows that the voice and sound must come from her own ground and soil now.
Having explored different art forms, she has finally chosen telling Taiwanese stories through songs from the ancient Chinese to current days, and to follow her bliss…
She likes to see herself as someone who uses this ancient musical instrument – moon guitar, to share shamanic spirits from nature and folklore of the mother earth. The instrument is two stringed, but says a lot in a simple ways, as most of life’s wisdom does.
长发披肩步轻盈，
身着彩衣特随性，
出行总会携月琴，
沉醉吟唱起共鸣，
最爱山林我独行，
花鸟鱼虫皆欢迎，
Tina 是她英文名，
中文名唤马丽英。
EMAIL: taiwanteama@gmail.com
